Posted by: Jane Douglas

Avatar is a mix of the groundbreaking and  the conventional.

On the surface, it’s safe, by-the-numbers stuff: an action-adventure-shooter starring a space marine on a hostile alien planet.

On top of that, it’s a movie tie-in (for James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi by the same name), the kind of game from which we don’t expect originality or particular technical achievement in the first place.

But Avatar is the first serious foray into 3D gaming on a console, if we don’t count the old-school red-blue 3D of the G-Force game (we don’t).

Stereoscopic 3D
The Avatar game uses the kind of polarised light stereoscopic 3D technology already making its way into the cinema – with Pixar’s Up, for instance.

With this tech, the light of the image put out by the TV screen alternates, frame by frame, between two polarisations. You wear special specs – they look a bit like unfashionable sunglasses – in which each lens allows only one kind of polarisation through.

The upshot is your TV shows one picture to your right eye, then one to your left, alternating fast enough for it to seem like a smooth, persistent on-screen image – with the illusion of depth (that third dimension) created by the slight difference between the left and right pictures.

Back to the game. On a planet called Pandora, the militaristic corporation who our space marine-alike works for is stuck in conflict with the blue, ten-foot-tall native race, along with all the hostile alien animals and plants.

The game doesn’t follow the plot of the film, the game’s animation director Brent George told us at Gamescom. Instead, it’s “a different window into the same universe, that is, Pandora. We focused really heavily on the environments, lore, flora and fauna and themes from the film.”

Jungle demo
In our hands-on demo, we fly, blast, run, shoot and drive our way through a Pandoran jungle, killing creatures resembling alien dinosaurs, driven across the map by missions and side missions. At one point we climb into a giant AMP mech suit to stomp around on a pack of wolf-like creatures.

It’s fun, though not revolutionary. There’s a variety of weapons – assault rifle, grenade launcher and flame thrower in the demo. There are skills to gain, too, among them stealth camouflage, a repulsor blast, a tactical strike from above. A scanner lets us check out the local wildlife’s lethal stats.

But as the time of day changes, through sunset into darkness, the environment blooms with bioluminescent light, colourfully glowing flora and fauna turning the scene from mostly green into a jungle rave. “All the geometry on the map will look different by night,” says Brent George, the animation director.

The effect is that much more exotic if you’re watching the stereoscopic 3D version of the game. Watched through the glasses, the jungle and characters pop up off the screen. The effect is convincing and vivid and rarely jarring in the way 3D sometimes is.

Key choice
The tired space marine scenario is further twisted by a critical choice later in the game, where the player is asked to decide between fighting for the corporation or the alien natives, the latter involving use of the eponymous avatar – a sort of psychically remote-controlled alien body that is handier with axes and maces than guns.

Making a good-looking 3D game is no mean feat, says George. Maintaining a high refresh rate to make the action smooth is harder when each picture has to be rendered and displayed twice (for the left and right eye); in effect, the game would have to run at 120 frames a second to give the appearance of a 60 frames a second game.

George invited us to feel the Xbox 360s running the 3D and 2D versions of the game. The console with the 3D version was much hotter, showing how much harder it was having to work.

Both the 3D and 2D versions of the game will come on the disc, but a special television is needed to display the 3D version. These TVs are very rare at the moment, though new and more widely available models are coming on the market in the near future.

When Avatar is released this winter, though, only a handful of gamers will have the kind of TV needed to play the game in 3D. And it will be a shame that most people will be playing the game stripped of that spectacle.